Here's an arbitrary list of famous people who've died in 2009.
Names in bold were on someone's list.
December
- Tommy Henrich, oldest living Yankee ballplayer, 96. He once said "Catching a fly ball is a pleasure, but knowing what to do with it after you catch it is a business."
- Jack Cooke, longtime bass player and singer with Ralph Stanley's Clinch Mountain Boys
- Liam Clancy, n Irish folk singer, the youngest and last surviving member of folk group The Clancy Brothers
- Eddie Fatu, WWF wrestler also known as Umaga
- Eric Woolfson, co-founder of the 1970s British progressive rock group Alan Parsons Project
- Marc Christian, lover of Rock Hudson who won a suit against his estate for having been infected with AIDS
- Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1967 - 1977
- Gene Barry, TV actor best known for "Bat Masterson"
- Harold Bell, one of the team that created Woodsy Owl
- Paul A. Samuelson, first American Nobel Laureate in economics, and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century
- Bob Heft, designed the fifty-star flag
- Larry Sultan, California photographer known for his scenes of suburban anomie
- Sol Price, founder of The Price Club
- Oral Roberts, 91, Pentecostal evangelist and founder of Oral Roberts University (Whoareyousteveharrison)
- Roy Disney, head of Disney after his uncle Roy died
- Chris Henry, Bengals wide receiver
- Yvonne King Burch, who gained early fame as one of the singing King Sisters in the big-band era and later brought her extended musical clan into show business as the King Family
- Jennifer Jones, 90, actress who won a Best Actress Academy Award for The Song of Bernadette (Graydon)
- Dan O'Bannon, screenwriter whose film credits include Alien and Total Recall
- Brittany Murphy, actress who appeared in Clueless, 8 Mile, and other films
- James Gurley, guitarist for Big Brother and the Holding Company
- Ayatollah Montazeri, leader of reform movement in Iran
- Connie Hines, actress who played Wilbur's wife on "Mister Ed"
- Alaina Reed-Amini, actress best known for her long-running roles as Olivia Robinson on "Sesame Street"
- Arnold Stang, a character actor whose bespectacled, owlish face and nasal urban twang gave him a singular and recognizable persona that led to roles as a milquetoast. He was one of two gas station attendants (Marvin Kaplan was the other) who witness the destruction of their station by Jonathan Winters in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and was the voice of TV's "Top Cat".
- Kim Peek, the real Rain Man whose almost unimaginable powers of memory were coupled with severe disabilities
Last updated January 7, 2010.
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